Upcycling

I haven’t blogged for five whole days. Since moving all the blogs to here that is unheard off, most days I do at least two blogs and I have really, and I mean really missed it.

I have been desperate to get back to the laptop and write away.

There is a lot going on at the moment, mainly blitzing the house getting ready for the Summer holidays and the visitors for the wedding, which isn’t going all that well really.

But also doing a lot of upcycling and revamping.

You see we decided last year, to get a lot of sturdy, well designed, going to last furniture.

And the option we could afford was older furniture.

So we were happy with that but decided to upcycle it to the design that we wanted.

One of the pieces we got was a bureaux for Baba’s bedroom. It was something that I really wanted to add an original twist to as it is in his bedroom and he loves it using it most days for some imaginative play, or clutter bombing, but still using it.

I knew what I wanted to do with it, the moment we went to B and Q and brought some Marvel wallpaper, but I never really got around to it, mainly because he has never had a chair.

That is until last week.

Last week one of my good friends posted that she was chucking these away.

It was too good an opportunity, especially as Baba has no chair in his art room downstairs, so it was perfect that there were two.

They were lovely and smooth and didn’t need any sanding and last Thursday night I went over my friends and got upcycling.

I wasn’t sure what to do with them at first but painted one blue. By the time I got home I found some lovely blue and white fabric and covered the seat, to make a great chilled out chair for Baba’s art room downstairs.

It was totally transformed and was so much fun to do that I knew I had to do the other chair quickly, firstly because I enjoyed it so much and secondly because it was taking up space it didn’t need to.

And I knew just what to do with the chair for Baba’s bedroom.

Using the blue paint I had used on the other chair, some spray adhesive, the Marvel wallpaper and one of Mr L’s old red t-shirts, I had a fantastic, vibrant chair within a couple of hours that Baba totally adored.

That night I knew over the weekend when Baba was away I had a project.

The spray adhesive isn’t something I like to do around the kids so them being at my sister’s was the perfect opportunity.

Within two days, Baba’s bureaux went from the above picture to this…

It was such fun to do although hard work as the bureaux was longer than the wallpaper so I had to match it up perfectly.

But seeing the transformation in front of my eyes made the fiddling bits and the measuring and the spraying and sticking straight all worth while, as you could instantly see the difference.

And seeing Baba’s face with the completed project really did make it all worthwhile.

I don’t think Mr L or I have ever seen him so excited, he was literally speechless for a while. That really made it worthwhile, and I hope now there will be years and years of use out of this old bureaux and chair that were both being chucked out of someone elses home.

I really enjoyed doing these pieces, years ago I wanted to be an interior designer, but instead I did psychology, when I am stuck in the middle of a project like this it makes me wonder why I decided not to go down the art route, and I do think that maybe I did make a mistake with that decision. It is something I will not regret, but always wonder if I should have followed my dream rather than be a bit sensible.

I did love every aspect of these projects and if we had more space I would do more and more, but we really don’t although I have come up with an idea for Scrapbookerry that I was struggling with before. It’s amazing what a bit of glue can do!